Dianne Olsen is a freelance writer, poet and garden consultant living in Massachusetts. She wrote the weekly “Valley Gardener” column for the Poughkeepsie (NY) Journal for four years in the mid-2000s. Now retired from a career as a horticulture and environmental educator with Cornell Cooperative Extension in Putnam County, NY, she volunteers at a teen center, food pantry garden and summer camp. She has an MA in Environmental Studies from SUNY Empire State College. Her freelance work has been published by Taste of Home; her poetry in Writer’s Resist, Colloquial Poetry, Mojave River Press and Review, and Postcard Poems and Prose.
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Night
I am happy when I wake at night,
hear your deep breathing,
see your face turned to me.
I place my hand under the covers,
not to wake you, you know,
but to feel the warmth of you,
feel your
sturdy ribs,
just where I…
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Rachel Norman currently lives and studies in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She has been published in the Falling Star Magazine.
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my corner of the world in a round planet
I shouldn’t grieve over this speck of geometry
When a planet awaits-
Yet not waiting, but moving on, clinging to me;
Trapped in the pull of the earth-
Quite an unwanted embrace.
But if even man is made of dust
What denies me the right to mourn my plot of it?
More like ashes- the fire suffocated,
So no hope of a phoenix there.
The smell of smoke and dust and lung cancer-
My red thread was tied to the streetlamp,
Now blown away by winds of change.
Boreas thinks he knows best
But my spare kite was torn before he took the string.
He thought it would give me closure-
If ashes are all that is left,
Would they be…
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I lost my voice believing in ghosts and before that
spoonfed my brother until he tied me to a chair. this was the beginning of wanting my kids to play dead in front of the nothing my eyes could do. one sockless and one sick. not forever.
reviews for Ghost Arson:
review by Dd. Spungin
Experiencing Barton Smock’s poetry is similar to living in a foreign country long enough to begin to understand the language.
Smock’s language is always intriguing, often foreign, more often brilliant in its ability to put images and concepts in the reader’s unsuspecting mind.
Certain poems/passages all but announce their meanings, as this from Gameshow Fatalities:
“see one of my children worrying less about suicide
and more about where it should happen. see: tub. see: easier
for a mother to clean.”
And some slide an idea into your consciousness such as this from Untitled:
“eternity
is a doll
reading
a menu, memorizing
a license plate
and doll
the first
eating disorder
in space”
Smock can shock, as well. Here, from Gestural Transportation, this standout stanza:
“the bread crumbs were eaten not by birds but by a
starving boy with a lost voice who’d wandered from his
home in a delirium brought on by a toothache. also,
Hansel & Gretel were two rich kids who killed someone’s
mother.”
The ethereal makes an appearance in the poem, Snow:
“say even god / would leave / this church
to step on the bones of a star”
Smock uses familiar subjects in much of his poetry: parents, siblings, children, but they are traveling in places that always surprise and make the reader stretch; it is a stretch most worthy of the effort.
To read these poems is a journey into a new art, and a privilege for the reader.
~
review by George Salis
It seems to me that a lot of modern poetry is not poetry, but simply non-fiction with line breaks, so it’s refreshing to read modern poetry from an actual poet. As he first demonstrated with infant*cinema, Smock is conscious of language, of the power of a few words, or few words, and his mostly minimalist poems have the ability to evoke endless dreamscapes. The infinite from the finite, another paradox from paradoxical poems, poems that are like alternate or anti-paracosms. For example, here is one titled “Mooon.”
moan, fossil. how do my feet look in my mother’s belly?
my heart is a pink flame / is my father’s / fingernail.
father calls me antler. I don’t know this yet. I will be
shot
by many hands.
By simply including an extra ‘o’ in the word ‘moon,’ elongating what Sir Richard Burton called the “corpse upon the road of night,” Smock conjures a wolf’s howl, a cow’s lament, creatures of childhood’s imagination and myth. And then we are given the juxtaposition, the amalgamation of vestigial past and fetal future and beyond, to the (moon) shot of doctors? adulators? murderers? An unborn heart metamorphosing from flame to fingernail, or existing as both simultaneously, like Schrödinger’s cat, until postnatal wave collapse. The phrase “father calls me antler” tells a story in and of itself, a mysterious nickname/endearment/joke/snide….
Considering Ghost Arson as a collection, there are obsessions or at least repetitions: owls, milk, ghosts, etc. The pinnacle obsession being god in all forms and personalities (“you picture god as a toddler studying a map” or “the airway of a god with a tail”), the word itself repeated nearly to the point of semantic satiation, a term coined by Leon Jakobovits James, who also suggested that the phenomenon could be employed to ameliorate phobias. Consciously or not, perhaps Smock is attempting to exorcise a theophobia. Conversely, the recurrence could be a mantra reverberating across poems.
Some of my favorite images include:
“step on the bones of a star”
“a snake made of milk”
“ear-shaped mirrors”
“spacesuits for stillborns”
“the owl with hands”
Surreal and soft-spoken, to enjoy Smock’s work one must learn to take pleasure in balancing on the fringe of the unknown and admiring the abyssal veil that stretches before you with scintillations that echo fallen stars. Read him and dream.
~
Ghost Arson (Kung Fu Treachery Press 2018)
have copies, on my person, now.
if you’ve read it or skimmed it or rewritten it…say something somewhere.
if interested in reviewing, contact me at ghostarson@gmail.com
book is 15.00 / orders can be made via paypal to ghostarson@gmail.com or by using link:
PayPal.Me/ghostarson
*be sure to include your address in the notes field
**all copies will be signed
or one can send a check to:
Barton Smock
5155 Hatfield Drive
Columbus, OH 43232
on amazon:
at barnes & noble:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ghost-arson-barton-smock/1129931893?ean=9781946642868
facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ghostarson/
a cricket
with a soft spot
for my son’s
cough
(in echo’s
unpainted
church
it is god until it hears its parents fight.
what her brain does to language could fill a tail with the dreams of a snake
some of which
are
my sleep
is my blood.
touch is the music of hell
said we
(sang mom
Descansos
poems, Katherine Osborne
salò press (2018)
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~ A red snow boot was carried out by the tide. -from (mid-swim savannah)
Listening is as listening mourns. In Descansos, Katherine Osborne memorializes with voice the sound that suddenness might make if blessed by longevity. How stirring, this outsider’s verse of inclusion. In which vault is our safekeeping? What is quieter than a moment of silence? There are asks, in this work, that will make you breathe under your breath. Osborne has command of occurrence, and gives the subtle order that whatever happens be randomly stunned. I am not sure what answers Osborne has gotten, but am glad for the auditing, overdue as it is, of grief’s word choice. If our passage has come to mean how bored we are in vehicles both idle and moving, Descansos takes our vacant stare for an absent glimpse and marks itself with vision.
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Emily Tuttle is a graduate of the University of Maryland College Park, where she was editor of two on campus journals and editorial assistant to ‘Poet Lore’ for two years. She has been awarded the Jimenez-Porter Literary Prize for Poetry. Previously, she has been published in Empty Mirror, Ghost City Review, Yes Poetry, and apt, among others.
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The Heart is a Halfway House
My childhood dog is dying,
and my brother doesn’t know
how to pick him up,
His gray atrophied back legs
give way
to arthritis, and he is stuck,
long toenails grasping
at slick, wood floors.
And my brother is scared
to reach underneath and sink
into the urine soaked underbelly,
rise him back to his feet, pet the
pilling skin atop his head
racked with fleas and dry age, and
whisper simple words
into his ear
to let him know he is loved—
how painful it…
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a shirtless child sets my food on fire. I want to cut myself but part of me is still teaching god air guitar in an outhouse. stun gun. riding mower. I learn how to point and bulimia
is the ghost
anorexia
isn’t.
mother, in goodbye, means goodbye.
kingsoftrain 